Sophie Stroeks

Sophie Stroeks, born in Valkenburg, received her bachelor degree in Biomedical Sciences in 2016 from Maastricht University. For her final bachelor internship she joined the lab of Dr. Timothy Yu at the Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical school, where she studied the genetic underpinning of autism disorders. With the ambition of combining research and clinics, she got accepted into the master program “Physician-Clinical Research” at Maastricht University. During her clinical rotations her interest in genetics increased and she joined the department of Clinical Genetics at the Maastricht University Medical Centre as a medical student under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Constance Stumpel and Prof. Dr. Han Brunner. For her final research internship she re-joined the Yu lab at Harvard Medical School where she has been working on the development of fully personalized genomic therapy using antisense oligonucleotides as a treatment of rare, rapidly progressive, and fatal neurodegenerative disorders in children. After her master (2020), she started working as a clinical and pre-clinical PhD-student in the research group of Prof. Dr. Heymans with a combined position at Maastricht University and KU Leuven (Belgium). She will be focussing on cardiogenetics and specifically on truncating variants in the titin gene.